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THE INNER CIRCLE
On the Job and at Home, Influential Hawks' 30-Year Friendship Evolves
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 — At a dinner this spring for former President Gerald R. Ford, Vice President Dick Cheney so artfully skewered his old boss, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, that the crowd got an instant glimpse into one of the closest and most important relationships in the nation's capital.
"So much has changed since I started out as an assistant to Don Rumsfeld," Mr. Cheney said, deadpan. "Today I look at Don and see the secretary of defense. He looks at me and sees — well, an assistant to Don Rumsfeld."
The crowd roared at a joke that summed up the three-decade friendship between the two superpowers of the Bush administration, who first worked closely together in 1969 in the Nixon administration, when Mr. Rumsfeld was director of the Office of Economic Opportunity and Mr. Cheney was his 28-year-old aide.
But what few people even in the capital understand is that each man also has a powerful deputy — Paul D. Wolfowitz for Mr. Rumsfeld and I. Lewis Libby for Mr. Cheney, who have known each other for 30 years in a parallel association and friendship that makes them closer to each other than to Mr. Bush, or to Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld.
These relationships, according to people who know all four men, are essential to understanding their current status as the most influential hawks in an already hawkish administration.
The events of Sept. 11 have made their bond even stronger, administration officials say, and their stands on crucial issues — from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to the International Criminal Court to the Middle East to Iraq — have often won out over the more cautious, more multilateralist camp led by as formidable a figure as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. The terrorist attacks made their arguments even more powerful with Mr. Bush, several senior administration officials said.
"They're very certain of their views," said Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan administration official who knows all four men. "They're not the kind of agonizing, Hamlet-like figures."
Though the four have weaved in and out of government over seven administrations, this is the first time they have assembled under the same president. Their supporters say that their coming together is a fortuitous development in an administration that has made the campaign against terrorism its priority. But detractors describe the four as dangerous and arrogant interventionists.
The men have "a pervasive philosophy of `We have to do what we think is right,' " a Republican ally of Secretary Powell said. " `And when it comes out, the rest of the world will know it's right, too.' "
In a recent interview, Mr. Rumsfeld acknowledged how important his longtime relationship with Mr. Cheney and others in the administration was to doing his job.
"It helps enormously," he said. "If you're dealing with people who you know how they think and how they move and what they do and what they worry about and what they think is important, and you don't have to begin at the beginning every time you meet with them, it's a big help."
Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld, as well as their deputies, declined to be interviewed for this article.
Together, the group has pushed forward a muscular American foreign policy toward Iraq with preemption as its central thrust, and arguing that in a dangerous, post-cold-war world the United States must reserve the right to strike first.
The men believe that if the United States doesn't shape the world order, it will spin out of control, and as a group supported the "evil empire" beliefs of Ronald Reagan more than the internationalism of the first President Bush.
Of the four, Mr. Cheney is closest to Mr. Bush, and operates as the president's No. 1 foreign policy adviser. But Mr. Rumsfeld counseled Mr. Bush on national security issues during the 2000 campaign, especially the need for missile defenses to thwart threats from countries like North Korea and Iraq. Mr. Wolfowitz was also a top national security adviser during the campaign.
The core of the quartet is the relationship between Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld, who three times have found themselves in the same supervisor-subordinate role. Mr. Rumsfeld was not only Mr. Cheney's boss at the Office at Economic Opportunity, but also as director of the Cost of Living Council later in the Nixon administration. Mr. Rumsfeld was Mr. Cheney's boss again as White House chief of staff during the Ford administration.
Eventually, the two shared some of the same titles: congressman, White House chief of staff (Mr. Cheney took Mr. Rumsfeld's place under Mr. Ford) and secretary of defense.
Over the years, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney became close friends. Mr. Rumsfeld and his wife Joyce were guests at the 35th wedding anniversary celebration in Wyoming that Mr. Cheney and his wife Lynne had in the summer of 1999, and are frequent guests in each other's homes.
Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Libby have a similar close friendship that began in 1973 when Mr. Libby was a student in Mr. Wolfowitz's political science class at Yale. Mr. Libby then worked for Mr. Wolfowitz in the Reagan administration beginning when Mr. Wolfowitz ran the State Department's policy planning office.
Mr. Libby worked again for Mr. Wolfowitz at the Pentagon in the first Bush administration, when Mr. Wolfowitz was undersecretary for policy and Mr. Libby was his deputy.
The four men do not see each other socially as a formal group, colleagues say, but they are frequently together at meetings arguing their point of view. Still, they are not a single policy bloc, and play different roles in relation to each other.
Mr. Rumsfeld is the chief executive, the man who likes to be in charge and bark out orders. "Rumsfeld is a kind of typical lightweight wrestler," said one senior administration official. "His management style is always to be in your face, raising questions, playing for the advantage and to take someone down."
Mr. Wolfowitz is the strategic thinker with a strong moral streak who provides Mr. Rumsfeld with his intellectual underpinnings. "Paul is the big brain who's thinking about strategies, policies and geostrategic implications," said Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota who knows Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz.
Mr. Cheney is the politician and synthesizer who relishes the process and worries about how to get from one place to another in the maze of Washington. "This is a vice president who's a prime minister, a senior counselor, a chief of staff, whatever he wants to be," said Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.
Mr. Libby, a lawyer known by his nickname, Scooter, is Mr. Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser. Once a speechwriter for former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Mr. Libby is adept at articulating and carrying out the vice president's ideas and troubleshooting for his boss. "Scooter always brings a trained lawyer's eye," said a senior administration official.
The four men met in ways both ordinary and unusual.
As a young graduate student on a fellowship in 1968, Mr. Cheney had a 30-minute job interview with Mr. Rumsfeld, then a Republican congressman from Illinois. The interview went badly, and Mr. Cheney went to work for another lawmaker. A long memorandum he later wrote on how to set up the White House Office of Economic Opportunity caught Mr. Rumsfeld's eye, and he hired Mr. Cheney as the new agency's Congressional liaison.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/11/p...4&ei=5070&fta=y
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